Are you tired of being told that nothing can be done or that you will just have to live with it? You are likely angry and frustrated. Would you be glad to know that there is a better way and something that you can start doing TODAY to begin defeating neuropathy?

We have good news for you. In Brenda’s upcoming class, she will share information with you that you’ve likely never heard that can help you take control of your neuropathy. After listening, you will be armed with the information, knowledge, and education you need to make the best choices to manage your neuropathy. You can move forward armed with the knowledge to free yourself from neuropathy.

Are you tired of being told that nothing can be done or that you will just have to live with it? You are likely angry and frustrated. Would you be glad to know that there is a better way and something that you can start doing TODAY to begin defeating neuropathy?

We have good news for you. In Brenda’s upcoming class, she will share information with you that you’ve likely never heard that can help you take control of your neuropathy. After listening, you will be armed with the information, knowledge, and education you need to make the best choices to manage your neuropathy. You can move forward armed with the knowledge to free yourself from neuropathy.

The liver’s job is to detox the body. When sugar and alcohol are present other toxic substances are stored in the body waiting for their turn to be detoxed. If sugar is always present other substances get stuck making us feel sick and tired.

Sugar is nothing but empty calories. While it might taste good, once its past your mouth it does absolutely NOTHING for you except add weight and inches. Stop eating sugar you will see your weight start to drop.

10-Day Detox Challenge

Join Betty Murray, Certified Nutritionist and Certified Functional medicine practitioner, Celia Naples and Kaelyn Pehrson – Certifed Health coaches for a enlightening talk about how toxins impact on weight gain, hormonal imbalances, fatigue and other disorders. we will discuss how to do the detox in detail and get you started on your journey to health in 2017.

This class will focus on what you need to know about the toxins in our environment:

Over 70,000 toxins in our foods, environment and air that lead to body burden

Food additives, obesogens and flavoring agents that make you fat, fatigued and famished

How your genetics may be setting you up for toxic overload and what you can do about it

How heavy metals and nutrient deficiencies are setting you up for chronic health concerns

and much, much more….

10-Day Detox Challenge with the Practitioners of Living Well Dallas

Receive a 10% discount if your pre-order your 10-Day Clear Change Program Kit by emailing Info@livingwelldallas.com by January 6th.

While there is a wide assortment of relaxation and visualization methods, most of these take conscious effort. With the breakthrough of light and sound brain training technology, you don’t have to “believe in “or “do” anything. Through frequency following response, the brain “syncs” to the gentle light strobes and embedded tones. You are in the experience and don’t have to create it. Negative thoughts, habits, and stress are the enemies of the brain. You can’t expect to have peak brain performance when it’s busy managing the flight-or-flight response that’s inherent in your overloaded lifestyle.

In order to overcome the brutal effects of stress, you must achieve the relaxation response, and it needs to happen every day. You can’t get into the relaxation response while generating beta brain wave activity. Your brain wave activity must dip into alpha, the intuitive mind, and theta, the inventive mind. In modern society, due to our environment and lifestyles, nearly everybody’s brain has habituated to high beta activity with little or no alpha or theta, which means few people ever engage the intuitive or inventive capabilities of their brains.

Many people believe that theta is the optimum state for creativity and that it’s the only place one can make a quantum leap in consciousness. But the theta state is difficult to maintain. When you slip into theta (4-7 Hz), which everyone does at least twice each day (right before falling asleep and just before awakening), and when there are no beta or alpha frequencies mixed with the theta, most people lose consciousness. This is where frequency following response comes in — it keeps your brain engaged and balances brain wave activity.

When people use light and sound technology, they often describe feeling as if their inner experience is more real than the outer experience, which is temporarily suspended. Most importantly, by training your brain to operate in a full-spectrum balance of brain wave activity, you’ll have a brain fortified for endurance and optimized for exceptional cognition, creativity, and inventiveness.

Our Brain Tap device accomplishes these relaxation brain states. These are great Christmas gifts that keep on giving. Call our office at 972-930-0260 to receive a 10% discount off the regular cost of $495 ($50 off).

While there is a wide assortment of relaxation and visualization methods, most of these take conscious effort. With the breakthrough of light and sound brain training technology, you don’t have to “believe in “or “do” anything. With our Brain Tap experience, the brain “syncs” to the gentle light strobes and embedded tones. You are in the experience and don’t have to create it. Negative thoughts, habits, and stress are the enemies of the brain. You can’t expect to have peak brain performance when it’s busy managing the flight-or-flight response that’s inherent in your overloaded lifestyle. In order to overcome the brutal effects of stress, you must achieve the relaxation response.

Come in for your Brain Tap Experience, called BrainZen. We will combine the Brain Tap with essential oils that will relax and soothe the stress right out of your day, along with a few minutes of Reflexology.

LED lights are applied to sore or painful areas of your body or where you are having digestive or elimination problems, for example. Since these lights help increase circulation, they are also great for sexual dysfunction in men or women. The near infrared lights penetrate all the way through tissue to bone and are cleared by the FDA for decreasing pain, swelling and inflammation, as well as increasing blood and lymphatic circulation.

At the same time, we will combine the LED LIghts with essential oils that will relax and soothe the stress right out of your day, along with a few minutes of Reflexology.

Whether you believe it or not, lean muscle naturally diminishes as we age, and if ever a statement was true, “use it or lose it” should be ringing in your ears if you are over 40. I can attest to this as I have been training people for over thirty years , mostly in the same facility which has allowed me to witness dramatic changes in scores of people over the years.

Science has already proven that resistance training is important for overall health, especially as we age. If you are interested in data and statistics, that’s an easy topic to google which will pull up literally thousands of research studies and articles. What I’m about to tell you comes from MY years of experience and not a study which for some people might be more practical advice.

First off, training properly with weights and resistance exercises can improve many facets of your life, starting with the way your body looks, how it feels, and even your mood. I have helped people overcome depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue, insomnia, weight issues, diabetes and a long list of other health issues introducing weight training into their lives. Another thing I’ve noticed over the years in my facility is that people who use weights in their fitness program are more consistent with their workouts and seem to have a higher level of satisfaction when it’s all said and done.

In general, people who live a healthy lifestyle and exercise regularly seem to age slower than people who don’t. Being in the gym most of my life I’ve grown accustomed to being surrounded by healthy, happy people. Sometimes it’s a shock to me when I’m out in the “real world” to see how unhealthy much of our population is, especially with all the resources available to live a healthy lifestyle. These days you can see a fitness center or gym on almost every corner. So, with this being said, maybe it’s time to think about making the most of your fitness routine and including some weights along with the treadmill and your yoga classes. I promise, you will be happy that you did.

If you don’t presently use weights in your fitness routine and you are considering it, here are a few tips that may help you get started.

1. If you have never lifted weights before, a trainer can be very helpful in making sure that you are using the proper form to avoid injury. Another great source is , believe it or not, YouTube. Trainers worldwide post videos that can be very helpful with almost any kind of exercises and I have found it to be very helpful for many people.

2. If you prefer doing cardiovascular work when you are in the gym, you can easily insert various weight exercises into your workout by simply stopping the machine you are on and heading to the weights for one or two sets and then it’s back to the cardio. This is a great way to get fit really fast.

3. A big misconception is that you need to lift weights several times a week to benefit from them, which is not true. Twice a week will work great if you have a balanced workout .

4. Two to three sets with eight to ten repetitions is a great way to start. As your body becomes adjusted to the resistance, you can slowly increase the poundages you are lifting, as long as you are not compromising your form

5. Don’t forget to let your body recover from your weight workouts. Basically this means, don’t lift every day, especially as you get stronger. Lots of people get excited when they start seeing changes in their bodies so they start lifting more and more. More is not better. Your muscles need to rest and recover for at least two to three days after a hard workout with weights.

6. Sometimes it helps to have a workout partner who can spot you and help push you just a little harder than you would otherwise do. It also helps to know that someone is waiting for you at the gym to make it harder for you to just go home and crash on the couch after work.

7. Last but not least, make sure to pay extra attention to your nutrition after you have begun adding weights to your fitness program. We truly are what we eat and if your body doesn’t have the proper nutrition to recover from your workouts, you won’t be able to enjoy optimal health and wellness.

My name is Shawn Alexander and I am a trainer at Physiofit in Dallas. I am excited to be contributing to the Living Well newsletter and welcome any questions you may have in regards to fitness and exercise. I can be reached at 972-839-1323.

Too much stress in your life doesn’t just affect your mental well being, it wreaks havoc on your body and could lead to symptoms mirroring those of hypothyroidism.

Types of Stress

Stress comes in a number of ways, some impacting us more than others and at different times in our lives. At some point in time, most of us will experience stress in some (or all) of these forms:

Financial stress

Relationships

Schedules

Commutes

Raising children

The stock market

Skipping meals

Living a “western” lifestyle

There are other factors not commonly considered when people think of “stress” which also burden the adrenal glands. Fluctuating blood sugar is the most common way that adrenal dysfunction and high or low cortisol can wreak havoc on the body’s metabolism by causing hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia. Other common factors that stress the adrenals are dysbiosis, food intolerances (especially gluten), chronic infections and autoimmune issues, environmental toxin and inflammation.

Stress and Your Body

The adrenals are two glands that are about the size of your thumbnail that sit atop the kidneys. They secrete hormones such as cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine. These hormones are responsible for our body’s response to stress. Adrenal fatigue is the name given to a poorly working adrenal gland in response to mental, emotional or physical stress.

Common symptoms of adrenal fatigue include:

Difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep and waking up

Mood swings

Frequent illness and susceptibility to colds and flues

Irritability or lightheadedness between meals

Sugar and caffeine cravings

Fatigue

Headaches

Eating to relieve fatigue

Dizziness when moving from sitting or lying to standing

Gastric ulcers

Poor functioning adrenals can cause hypothyroid symptoms without any problem in the thyroid gland itself. In such cases, treating the thyroid is both unnecessary and ineffective and addressing the adrenals themselves is the key to improving thyroid function. Many times, people, especially women, have been treated with thyroid hormones only to have no relief of their symptoms of weight gain, fatigue, hair loss, insomnia, etc.

Adrenal stress can also impact thyroid function more direct ways, including the following five mechanisms:

Promotes Autoimmunity by Weakening Immune Barriers — The digestive tract, lungs and the blood-brain barrier are the primary immune barriers in the body. They prevent foreign substances from entering the bloodstream and the brain. Adrenal stress weakens these barriers and promotes poor immune system regulation. When these immune barriers are porous large proteins and other antigens like lipopolysaccharides are able to pass into the bloodstream or brain where they don’t belong. The immune system gets keyed up and we become more prone to autoimmune diseases.

Disrupts the HPA Axis — Studies have shown that the inflammatory cytokines (messengers) IL-1 beta, IL-6 and TNF-alpha, which are released during the stress response, down-regulate the HPA-axis and reduce levels of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH). So your body doesn’t make as much thyroid hormones.

Reduces Conversion of T4 (inactive thyroid hormone) to T3 (active thyroid hormone) — 93% of the hormone produced by the thyroid gland is T4, in inactive thyroid hormone that must be converted into T3 before it can be used by the cells. The inflammatory cytokines from adrenal stressors disrupt the hypothalmus-pituitary-adrenal gland (HPA ) axis, they also interfere with the conversion of T4 to T3 in peripheral tissues such as the liver and the gut. Inflammatory cytokines have been shown to suppress the conversion of T4 to T3. In fact, inflammatory cytokines have been shown to suppress thyroid receptors on the cells making the thyroid hormones ineffective at increasing cellular activity. While there’s no practical way to measure receptor site sensitivity in a clinical setting, the research suggests thyroid receptor messaging is decreased in autoimmune and other inflammatory conditions.

Causes Other Hormonal Imbalances — Cortisol is released by the adrenals during the stress response. Prolonged cortisol elevations, caused by chronic stress, decrease the liver’s ability to detox excess estrogens from the blood. Excess estrogen increases thyroid binding globulin (TBG), the proteins that thyroid hormone is attached to as it’s transported through the body, making the hormone inactive. TBG is like a cab that drives the hormone around. When it is not functional, the thyroid hormone cannot get out of the cab. Other drugs can also increase elevated TBG including birth control pills and estrogen replacement.

What Do You Do If You Have Poor Adrenal Function?

Adrenal stress is caused by many factors from diet, lifestyle and psychological stress to immune issues, dybiosis and inflammation. When these conditions exist, they must be addressed or any attempt to support the adrenals directly will either fail or be only partially successful.

Additional nutritional supplementation of phosphatidylserine and adaptogenic herbs like Siberian ginseng, Ashwagandha, Rholdiola and Holy basil leaf extract are also helpful in supporting the adrenal glands

Betty Murray, CN, IFMCP, CHC is a Certified Nutritionist & Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner with the Institute for Functional Medicine, founder of the Dallas-based functional medicine clinic Living Well Dallas and Executive Director of the the Functional Medicine Association of North Texas. A master of the biochemistry of the body, Betty teaches her clients how to utilize nutrition for autoimmune diseases, digestive disorders, MTHFR and weight loss. You can find her book “Cleanse: Detox Your Body, Mind & Spirit” on Amazon here.